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My parents are trying to ruin my vegetarianism

Recently I became a sort-of vegetarian. Or, as I called it when I "officially" announced it (read: posted it as my facebook status so that people would know not to cook me meat if I come over to their houses), a quasi-vegetarian. What I really am is a humane eater or ethical-tarian or whatever other douchey sounding name you want to put on it. Basically, I got tricked into reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safron Foer and realized that as a human being with a conscience, I could not justify eating animals that had been cultivated in such ridiculously inhumane ways. I mean really, it's terrible for the animals, the environment, the workers, and for the people eating them. I won't go into all the details now, read the book if you don't believe me. Just beware that you will experience a LOT of cognitive dissonance if you are a meat-eater and have a conscience. Seriously. A lot.

So now, for all intensive purposes, I am a vegetarian. I'll eat meat if the animals were happy and healthy, the workers were treated fairly, and the farm is ecologically friendly, which basically means that I don't eat meat ever. Except that my parents have tracked down a shop in Abbotsford that they claim is all Andrea-friendly meat. And every time I go out for a visit they load me up with meat from this shop. I end up cooking and eating this meat because I feel guilty that my parents went to all this extra effort for me to get it and I don't want it to be wasted.

This all adds up to mean that now that I'm a "vegetarian" I cook and eat more meat at home than I ever did in the past. It's weird and confusing. It forces me to experience a whole separate realm of cognitive dissonance.

Also, it appears that after kaiboshing my intake of meat (at least for a little while before my parents discovered their happy meat palace), I don't really like the taste of it as much. Especially the darker meats. Yuck. Unfortunately, this adds just one more layer to my fun with cognitive dissonance.

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